by Kate Bradley
Our sex life had long since dwindled away. There had been a nasty incident, when late at night, drunk, he’d tried to have sex with me. He’d held me down by my wrists, each of his legs pinning my own, and I had struggled, hissing into his ear that I hated him. In the end, he’d collapsed into my shoulder, sobbing, crushed by his own violence and impotence.
As he lay there, his tears mixed with my own, I think we both knew how much our dream was broken, and perhaps we hated ourselves just a little more.
We were stuck, unable to go back, unwilling to go forward.
So the day of the Skittles argument, desperate to get away from him, I selected the correct bandage from my extensive, pilfered-from-work first-aid stores. Then I had the idea.
Like most nurses, my own home first-aid kit was second to none. Like most nurses, I didn’t think twice about taking home a half-used roll of Micropore, some ‘spare’ dressings, some Steri-Strips. I winced at the bandage. And then I had what might have been one of the most defining thoughts of my life: I bet I could get some decent painkillers at work today.
As I fetched my car keys, I realised that I was looking forward to going to work and I was already mentally shopping for something better.
And so started my second, secret addiction.
*
Nick knew about my first addiction and had actually been incredibly supportive. But the second time, I kept it fiercely hidden. There are advantages to anything if you look hard enough, but I didn’t have to look very hard for the advantages to codeine and Valium. They improved how I reacted to the world, and with it, things improved at home. For example, Jack didn’t sleep through the night until he started school and before then, there was still lots of crying and restlessness, but the codeine stopped me from getting too maudlin about being permanently exhausted.
But when Jack turned five, I realised that Nick had known about my drug abuse. And it only happened because I’d been careless.
Every birthday, my mother arranged lovely gifts from prison. Because she couldn’t send anything herself, her sister, my aunt who raised me after my own grandmother died, took on the role of gift organiser. My mother told my aunt what to buy and my aunt packaged it and sent it.
Jack loved getting his Nana parcels. On his fifth birthday she sent him a plaster-of-Paris Peter Rabbit money-box kit. It was bigger than the average money-box, a sizeable thing. We’d never made anything like it before and when he’d first ripped open the delivery package and we saw what was inside, my heart sank because I thought he’d hate it.
I was surprised when he seemed to be intrigued by the kit. He turned the box over and over, looking at the pictures, and he silently mouthed the words as he read the box-front instructions. I hated mucky art things and thought he’d start it and then lose interest, so I distracted him, tucked it away and forgot about it.
But a couple of days later I had come home from a difficult shift at work and had found Jack and his dad very proud of themselves. There had been a sudden death on the ward and dealing with the traumatised relatives had been upsetting. I was in no mood to find the clean kitchen I’d left now covered with mess: powered plaster-dusted surfaces; wet plaster-smudged faces and my unread Marie Claire laid out as a half-arsed attempt to protect the table. They’d mixed the plaster-of-Paris in my favourite kitchen jug and hadn’t bothered rinsing it, so the now dry plaster coated its insides. But reddened with achievement, Jack sat on his dad’s lap and they both held up the rubbery, liquid plaster-filled mould like it was something amazing.
And instead of forgetting about it, they seemed obsessed with it. They prodded the foul-smelling thing with interest every minute, Jack asking his father over and over: ‘Is it ready yet?’ and then it became every hour, and all I could think of was the trauma of the time of death being called and then the new widow screaming. Then, when nobody helped me trying to tidy the table for tea, I lost my temper and that was that.
Two days later, I went shopping. When I came back, I was annoyed to find them painting, the table a mess again, and Jack’s school uniform too, but the result was beautiful. It’d come with little plastic paint pots and now Peter Rabbit was the right shade of brown, with white-and-black eyes and little blue coat.
‘Jack did it all himself!’ his dad said, and paint-smudged Jack grinned.
‘It’s lovely. Very well done.’
‘No, Lisa, I mean Jack really did paint it all by himself!’ He beamed at his son and stroked Jack’s heavy fringe out of his eyes. ‘I mean he did every little bit of it and I just watched!’
And it did look good but the next day it looked even better. Jack, who’d never really made anything, saw the whole project through and finished it by opening the final pot and giving it a coat of varnish. It gleamed and sat in the prize spot in the middle of the kitchen table for a month, until I finally wanted my fruit bowl back and put the Peter Rabbit in Jack’s room.
And when it was there I could finally stop thinking of my mother. Because I don’t know if she remembered or not but she’d bought me one of those kits when I was a kid. I’d opened the paint pots before making the cast and used them to paint a picture. I thought she would be impressed, but she only scolded me for not using the kit properly. She told me I was too impatient. I had so few memories of living with my mum before she was sent to prison, I was sorry to be reminded of a negative one.
But my sad childhood and extra cleaning aside, I was pleased that Jack was finally showing some passion. Then one day I’d had too much codeine and made a very stupid, very regrettable mistake.
seventeen:
– before –
My love for codeine meant that I sometimes took risks.
I’d been able to take more than I’d hoped because I’d done an agency shift at a private nursing home and the senior nurse on duty was a very lovely, very unobservant woman.
It felt great to have a proper stash and I was feeling a bit off because it was my mother’s birthday and, when push came to shove, I just missed her and wanted to be with her, and although it’d been years, I wished I could turn back time and use the poster paints differently. I knew it seemed like a strange thing to get hung up about, but losing her at just eight-years-old was just painful. Every time I went into Jack’s room, seeing the Peter Rabbit opened up old wounds of missing her and missing her and missing her, and I just wanted to escape feeling crap.
It was a lovely day in June and the sun was shining; it had been a hard spring because Nick was working extra shifts to pay for the new bedroom carpets and a few other bits and bobs we’d splashed out on, and I was feeling low.
So I popped an extra tablet and maybe a small amount – maybe even only a couple of milligrams of diazepam – but it made all the difference and I finally felt candyfloss happy.
I’d put my new headphones on so I could listen to my music without Jack covering his ears. With Nick out of the house I could clean as much as I liked without any snide comments.
I had cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom and had moved on to the floors. The carpets simply dazzled me in their loveliness – we’d bought them only a month ago and settled on a soft grey in a wool mix and I loved to keep them clean. We’d also – because it seemed silly not to when we had new carpets – bought a super-flash hoover. I just loved it! I loved running it over and over the cut pile, feeling it pull up all the dirt so there was no muck left behind.
At the time I felt as if I could hoover up the filth out of my life: but I was wrong.
I was hoovering, headphones in, Queen loud in my ears and singing loudly, when Nick came in.
I jumped just to see him. I hadn’t expected him to be home for hours, so to see him in his police uniform there in the doorway alarmed me. I glanced at the bedroom clock and was stunned to see it was after seven. The music still blared in my ears. He was saying something but I couldn’t hear him and I was having trouble adjusting: where had the time gone? I thought it was four – definitely no later than five. But now . . . all that
time had passed me by.
What had I been doing?
And where was Jack?
I think I just stood there blinking. I knew it took me longer to order my thoughts when I was on diazepam and codeine together. I didn’t always like it but I accepted it because it was worth the feeling they gave me.
Then Nick took a step towards me and I knew I was in trouble.
He looked furious: eyebrows drawn into a line; blue eyes stormy; large hands up and gripping the air as if already wringing my neck. He was mouthing something but I couldn’t hear. I could tell he was shouting, because his Adam’s apple was jumping up and down as if it believed if it bounced high enough it could escape out of his mouth. When the idea amused me almost to a giggle, I realised that I was stoned – too stoned.
He strode closer and with one hand yanked on the wire and my headphones popped from my ears.
‘You.’ Bam: he pushed against my chest. ‘Silly.’ Bam: again. ‘Bitch.’ Bam. The last time was hard enough to make me swing my arms wildly to stay upright.
With the other hand, he thrust broken pieces of something (a plate? no, a mug? no, not sure) under my nose. ‘What have you done, Lisa?’ he shouted.
I blinked, unsure. What had I done? I’d been in another world, a place where the carpet became clean in smooth easy strokes, the music had been all-consuming, and everything had been lovely. Fun; mellow; lovely.
‘You don’t know, do you, Lisa? Because, as fucking usual, you’re out of it!’
It was confusing. It was horrible. Without my earphones, without the music, I could hear Jack screaming somewhere out of sight. The change was abrupt. The information overload was too much: Jack was upset; his dad was white with fury; I was in big, big trouble; something was broken. He thought it was me – was it?
I thought I had been doing a good thing by cleaning the flat, but it didn’t seem to matter. The soft grey carpets had never looked better but it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered because I realised that he knew about me: he knew about my tablets.
Could he? Is that what he meant?
My mind went slow: replaying his words. As fucking usual, you’re out of it! I held on to the hoover, my hands clenching the handle.
I blinked, uncertain.
He stared at me, his thin face twisted with fury. ‘How long do you expect me to put up with this shit?’ he said, his question now full of rattlesnake warning.
I scrabbled along the wall to get away from him. I could get no further because our sofa blocked my path. I could hear the warning in his voice. What ‘shit’ was he talking about? What did I have to defend? The chair pressed into my back legs. I wanted to get away; I glanced past him thinking I might be able to dodge and weave and be free. But now I could see, standing in the doorway watching it all, was the crying Jack. He was cuddling his new soft plushie Peter Rabbit (because everything now was Peter Rabbit this, Peter Rabbit that).
His father grabbed me by the shoulders, his fingers talons in my flesh. I didn’t see him but he leaned in so close I could smell cigarettes on his breath. ‘You. Are. A,’ he hissed, ‘Disgrace.’
Jack finally seemed to have stopped crying. He’d plugged his mouth with his thumb and rubbed and rubbed the rabbit’s ear against his face.
‘You’re an embarrassment, Lisa.’ I could feel his father’s spittle spray against my face. He pushed me much harder this time: bam! Maybe because I wasn’t looking at him but instead at the rub, rub of Peter, I fell back easily, bouncing off the wall from my hip, onto the sofa.
The impact forced my jaw up, banging against my top row of teeth. The impact jolted my brain and forced me back to my husband. He dropped the pieces at my feet, his voice cold: ‘You were just so jealous.’
I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain: I did not want to see. Yet after a breath, I opened them anyway.
I saw what he held. The brown; the carefully painted blue. I had broken Peter Rabbit. Then I had a flash: I remembered banging Jack’s bedside unit with the vacuum; I saw it wobble . . . but then it had gone. I don’t know what happened afterwards. But I do remember I wasn’t thinking too hard. I was just singing and hoovering, singing and hoovering, singing and hoovering. It’d been such a nice day.
He stepped forward again, his jaw tight, his eyes hard.
I put my arms over my head to protect myself.
I wanted to have my headphones back in and listen to Queen and watch the carpet stripe as the vacuum lifted the pile. It felt good and orderly and neat and controlled.
But this was a mess of shouting and thin, reedy screaming as a top note trying to be heard. The screaming rose even higher and I wasn’t sure if it was me or Jack. It was all such a blur.
I couldn’t see him but I kept my eyes squeezed shut and tucked my head behind my knees making myself into a ball. But as frightened as I was, the codeine and diazepam made it a manageable haze. It was as if I had a thick duvet over me and even though his words landed like blows, and my mind fluttered like a nervous bird with questions, none of it was too bad. I couldn’t quite feel the impact of any of it through the duvet of the drugs.
As the codeine coated me in eiderdowns, and I felt the kicks to my kidneys, I felt that nothing was going to change. It was then that I decided my therapist was right: it did have to change. It was time to pack a go-bag.
eighteen:
– before –
Just when it felt like nothing was ever going to change, everything changed very quickly. A week after the attack I’d received because I broke Peter Rabbit, following the ideas I’d explored with my therapist, my go-bag – clothes, money, etc. – was packed and hidden in my wardrobe. Of course, I dreaded my husband finding it, but I piled things over the top of it and hoped for the best. Now I was poised for flight – just one more raised voice and that bag would’ve been in my hand and nothing would’ve changed my mind.
It’d been nearly two years since I had started my plan. It’d taken that long to save a decent fund, but I was there now, both financially and – after my therapy – emotionally too.
I remember Jack had just broken up for the Easter holidays. Irene still helped out during the school holidays, but on that day she’d been ill and unable to have him. We’d been at home together and, woken from a Valium-induced nap, I’d become aware of Nick’s shouting. Getting up, I followed the shouts into the front room.
Nick lay collapsed on our brown leather chesterfield, crying and rocking back and forth like a toddler. In his hand he held the bloodied broom. In front of him, Jack was standing just out of reach.
Winston lay on the floor, clearly dead, and Nick was crying with regret; like Jack he was usually hard, as if the release of emotion was a struggle. I stood in the doorway, gripping the door handle. I could smell his beer. The only strong emotion I saw normally was anger flashing in his blue eyes.
I had gone years without seeing him cry and now this made two days in a row . . . things were becoming unravelled, fast. As I stood there, doing pathetically nothing, Nick’s howl reached a new higher level of anguish. Then he looked up and reached for his son. Jack stood in front of him, face expressionless. ‘Jack . . . come here’.
Jack reacted, snapped out of his stasis. He clutched his hands to his cheek, his eyes pure rounds of fear. And I finally noticed a dribble of blood slowly running from his nostril.
I think I yelled: ‘What have you done?’ They didn’t even notice me.
‘Please,’ Nick begged him. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. So sorry. Please forgive me.’
Sorry.
A dead dog and a bloodied son. The word hangs in the air. This was new – Nick hitting Jack – but the apology was so pointless, so redundant and powerless, it felt like an affront to be there at all. Sorry? A dead dog and we have sorry?
I think about Issy warning me of this – and I dismissed it. I said it could never happen.
Jack shuffled away from his dad. Instead, he stood in the corner, next to the painted original Victorian s
hutters that I had personally sanded and painted with three coats of perfect Silk Sigh White. I loved those shutters, but I knew I would never look at them again without thinking of this moment. My son turned his head away from us both and stood so close as if he was examining my work. There were two imperfections about where his head was, two hairs that came away from the brush unnoticed, now caught forever in the paint. It bugged me more than I knew it should, those hairs. When I cleaned I always trailed my nail over them, hoping to knock them free. It would leave a chip in the paint, but then I knew I’d have the excuse to make a repair.
Nick stared at his son who stood in the corner by the imperfect paint. I could see Jack put his hand to his nose and then look at the blood on his fingertips. It made me frightened of what was going on in his mind.
He was only five years old. What had we done to him? Now his pet dog was dead. Things could never go back to what they had been. Never.
I wished I could chip this whole day out of my life. I wished I could just sand down the damage until it was gone and start again with another coat of Silk Sigh.
Nick reached out, his hand outstretched. There was a smear of blood on his finger. ‘Please,’ he called out in a voice so thick with emotion, I barely recognised it. ‘Jack! I’m sorry I lost my temper!’
The word sorry seemed to hang in the air, as thin as smoke and as vulnerable, before it instantly evaporated into nothing.
Nick realised that Jack wouldn’t turn around for him, so he collapsed to his knees, and bent to pick up the broken body of Winston. The bulldog had always really been Nick’s idea – he brought him home as a puppy when Jack was just a baby. I was annoyed at first but then I fell completely in love with Winston.
Nick dropped the broom and picked him up, the back part of his body flopping: his spine was broken. Snap.